


In Disputation

by marketchippie



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, The Borgias (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-28
Updated: 2010-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five marriages in which Lucrezia Borgia plays the bride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Disputation

_I: 1486_

“You will be married,” her father tells her, “someday.”

She is young, far too young to have any misconceptions of the idea. The thoughts that flicker through her head are hazy, veiled with white and glamour, barely coalescing into image at all. She sits on his knee and wonders as her father presses a hand to the base of her neck, against the gold curls there beneath the white cap on her head.

“Do not worry, my Lucrezia, I’ll make it someone nice. A prince, with gold in his saddlebags. How’d you like that, eh?”

There is something amiss in this vision, though she cannot quite place her finger on what. Gold is good, gold is bright, but it’s also terribly heavy—“Wouldn’t that hurt the horse?” she asks with a small frown, and her father laughs, the mountain of him producing volcanos of mirth.

“My girl.” He rumples her hair, knocking her cap askew. “My terribly clever girl.

“Go run off and play with your brothers,” he says, and she slides off his lap, running along the cobbled expanse of Mamma Vanozza’s courtyard to the corner where Cesare sits. Juan is running about along the other side, throwing a ball against a column again and again—she thinks there is a game to be played there, belike, but he has got fed up with the rules, and the little wooden ball knocks again and again in the same spot. She laughs and steps into the shade beneath the tiles, standing above Cesare and his book. He is a long boy of ten, his legs in their hose splayed and stretching along the ground.

“Father says I am to be married,” she says.

“What?” He gets to his feet, head and shoulders above her. “Now?”

“No, silly,” she laughs. “Someday.”

“And what d’you make of that?” His face is furrowed; birdlike, she cocks her head and watches it as if she could read there what he reads in pages.

“He said it could be nice. I don’t see why he’d make such a fuss over it anyhow.” She tosses her head. It is a burning sort of summer day, but the slate shadows are cool over their heads. “I ought to just marry you.”

He looks at her with large, wary eyes. “I don’t think that’s the point.”

“Why not?” Behind the veiled glowing ideologies of marriage-talk, she knows, are words of forever, and it is an unquestioned truth that her brother is forever; they are a compact and they always have been since she was born. There’s only been one person patient enough to play at princes with her, and he is standing in front of her and looking down at his too-large silk-slippered feet.

“We’re family already.”

“Exactly,” she says, and offers her palm. “That’s what it means, doesn’t it?”

Hesitantly, his palm lines up against hers. “If you say so,” he says, a confidential smile lurking around the edges of his mouth, “perhaps it’s different for girls.”

Over his shoulder, she can see her father still sitting in the center of the courtyard. There is a smile on his face. It strikes her as not strange at all that he should pass on such a smile: for her, she thinks, sitting up in the happy gleam of it, just for her. For them, for she reflects it back to Cesare as easy as breath.

 

_II: 1494_

She has read this story many times, seen it printed in a thousand little lithographs the size of her palm—Saint Catherine of Siena, canonized in starved bones and gleaming holy face—yet she has never lived in it, not until Father ( _Papà_ , now, to more than just her and her brothers) decided to christen their chambers with allegory. “And we must have the most beautiful women in all of Italy gracing the Lord’s house!” he had boomed with one hand outstretched toward her face (the other one near Giulia Farnese’s backside).

Pinturrichio has been taking sketches of her face for weeks now, but this is the first time she has stood for him. It feels strange, the weight of the gilded gown and the pearled cap atop her head, the gold lace tight along her wrists and the red velvet of the overskirt hanging in rich folds that shift when she moves. She is still, now, statue-struck and paralyzed in the light that Pinturrichio so approves: “perfect, perfect,” he murmurs to himself, his pinched little face smoothing with pleasure as he daubs brush in tempera, in gold. “No, no, Madonna Lucrezia, you must look that way—look up.”

She looks up. She lifts her hands to the sky and imagines the Holy Spirit clasping radiant fingers in hers. Santa Catarina, married to Christ himself. Her chin tilts skyward, ceiling-ward, to the splendid dome of the roof over their heads. Pinturrichio mutters approval and her limbs do not even want to fidget even under so many exhausting layers of cloth on a day of breathless warmth. In the gold trappings of the room she feels sunlight, holy light, reflecting onto her upraised cheeks and eyelids. This, more than any drowsy incense-dusted Mass, is a piece of truth. This is beautiful. Pinturrichio’s walls come out in searingly rich color and, when he finally permits her to step back and look, she smiles so wide she feels that her face will cleave, broken on the wheel of this pleasure like other Catherines—more doomed, enacted by other models, her father would never have her so.

“It looks well, Master Pinturrichio.”

She whirls around. “Cesare, I didn’t know you’d be about!”

Her brother steps into the sala, looking first at her before he turns his attention to the walls. “Nor I,” says Pinturrichio, folding his paints, “but your worship, if it isn’t too bold, His Holiness permitted me ask—”

“Anything you like,” Cesare says, waving a lazy hand through the air.

“If I might sketch your worship’s face, I’ve a triptych of Sebastian in mind—”

“With the arrows?” Cesare raises a dark eyebrow, mouth not moving a twitch; she sees amusement plain in his eyes, hears it rich in his voice, but the painter looks down and begins to collect his utensils all the more quickly.

“Or even the Christ himself, perhaps, I merely wondered—”

“As you like, man, you can paint me any way you please.”

Pinturrichio pauses, paints tucked under his arm. “We’ll speak,” Cesare says.

“Indeed,” the painter replies and scurries out of the room.

In the absence of any others, Cesare’s presence sits more easily. “It suits you, sis,” he says, and she places her hands on her hips, gold net tickling her fingers.

“What does?”

“The gown. Sainthood. Prettiest in the canon by far—which one is it?”

“The Disputation of Saint Catherine,” she says, the fulsome name sounding prim and small in her mouth, but she cannot help smiling again—unsaintlike, to be sure, but still pleased. There is a bright alertness to her painted reflection that cannot but please her, a brightness in her skin reflected from the gown and even into her brother’s eyes. She steps forward. “Married to the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Would Pinturrichio have you be my husband, brother?”

His eyes snap into wariness. They do that far too easily these days: she blames the cardinal hat he wears so uncomfortably on his head. Shadows his eyes too heavily. He has dark, sad eyes; she does not blame the painter’s desire to give them over to the martyrs, certainly not now. “That’s a child’s joke.”

It is, that. And yet she cannot but remember: “It was ours.”

“Yes.” He nods and looks away to the wall. Her palms hold the memory of his promise; she lifts them up delicately in mirror of the pose on the wall and finally he smiles—thin, but true.

“Are you well, brother?” she asks softly, and he bows his head. The sala is silent around them; the court is elsewhere and the room is taken up with him: with his silence, the shadows on his face. She watches him and waits.

“My sainted sister, what would you have me say?” He looks up with a dark quirk of the mouth. “As a man of the church, I am bound to hear what you tell me.”

She laughs, biting the sound back into her mouth in the bright, echoing room. “I am no saint, not yet. I’m not so good as all that.”

“Yet you embody one so well,” he says, and there is something in her that shivers at his look. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to pray for me, I hope you know.”

“Do I need to pray for you?”

“You need to pray for our idiot brother.”

“What’s Juan—” she begins, and Cesare shakes his head.

“It’s soldier’s stuff, sister.” His hand touches the edge of the cardinal’s hat he wears, fingers brushing sharply along his forehead. “Games he plays very poorly.”

She is silent. “I will pray,” she finally promises, choosing his words and his cadence, too, “for our idiot brother.”

At this he laughs, properly laughs. “And the world shall be grateful—and maybe a measure of grace will go with him.” His mouth sours again, and she steps in another step closer.

“What else would you have me do?”

The church air, she thinks, is bad for his moods—and he is, has always been, moody well enough. “I’d have you take off that silly hat,” she says softly. With saintless belligerence, she reaches up, touches the brim, tips it into her hands. “There, then. That suits you much better.”

There is amusement on his face, sure enough, but there’s rue enough to drown it, too. “Would that I could.” He lays a hand on her wrist, fingers wrapping around the narrow joint of it over gold and skin. “But we mustn’t blaspheme, sis.” The hat is heavy in her hands. He takes it back, replaces it on his dark head.

“I prefer Pinturrichio’s casting to Father’s,” she says in a voice only loud enough to carry between the two of them, “but neither of them is yours. I would have you painted as yourself.”

“And so would I,” he replies, “but I’m off to serve God, you know.” His fingers dance themselves a little cross in the air between them; this strikes her perhaps as a bigger blasphemy than anything else. “Pray, if you like.”

“I would like,” she mutters, and watches him go, watches the robes billow bright around him as he walks. He wears them like a prince in ermine, like none of God’s other footmen that surround her father do, and she knows it must not be a God-determined act—if that is how the robes were supposed to be worn, no one would ever inhabit them in any other way.

 

_III: 1497_

She does not attend supper that night. The apartments are quiet, solitary, soundless. She sits on the edge of the bed and looks at her hands: her purported husband, her former husband, Sforza, who had looked at her with muddy-eyed lust and barely spared two words for her over dinner. She looks closer and closer until her face is submerged in her hands, her fingers hard against her eyelids; she will not cry for lies, she is—told again and again to be—better than that, higher, _more_.

There comes a knock on her door. She lifts her head, straightening her spine, and calls a quiet affirmative; her maid pokes her head through the heavy wooden door. “Madonna, your brother—”

“Let him in.”

The maid closes the door and she is pleased—as best she can muster pleasure tonight—that she sent Adriana away. In bygone years, she would not have gone, but now that Lucrezia has been a wife her words bear new weight. In bygone years, she would have sat with the two of them and pestered them with this and maddening that, and there would not have been a quiet moment to be had.

The door reopens and he steps inside.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says. She doesn’t intend it to come out sharp, but it does—bitter on the tongue. “They’ll talk.”

“They do talk,” he says, and with two strides he’s at her bedside, kneeling by her own knees. “I couldn’t eat without you by. I suspected you might be crying, and it put me off my food.”

He is abominably clever, she knows, and yet she is every now and again stunned by his sheer capacity for foolishness. She wonders if he hides it so poorly from anyone else, or if it is merely she who knows what Cesare Borgia looks like when he’s acting the fool. Yet his foolishness is part and parcel with her own—which traps her in her room, paralyzed, her heart beating brave blood in a trapped body. “Is that what you think women do in the privacy of their bedchambers?” she asks. “Cry?”

When he looks down, she is reminded—somewhat pointedly—that he knows better, that they both do. “No,” he replies. Blood flushes sharp in her cheeks.

No, indeed.

His hand takes her own, which lies limp and curled like a cup in her lap. Fingers twined with hers. Slowly, almost reverently, he lifts it to his lips, presses mouth against skin below beringed knuckles—just as she has seen him do countless times with (his Holiness) their father. This is the Borgia benediction, and her heart beating like an animal in a snare, that must be the catechism.

He is not God’s any longer.

She mustn’t think that way, she thinks—he is the world’s now, the army’s, he is his own first and foremost, but that ought not mean he has sloughed off the benevolent eye of the Lord. Yet she knows it, knows it in her bones. He is a soldier, he is his own soldier, he is no crusader, though she cannot but see him as a potential knight.

God, she thinks these days, is not watching. He has left his kingdom in their father’s hands; his eyes are not on them, on this tableau. The cities talk, Sforza sings their names into a tapestry that doesn’t resemble them, and God does not watch her clasp her brother’s hand.

The knowledge of goodness lives in her as acutely as anything else. Deep in her marrow, deeper than her memories of hymns and Aves, reflected in her father’s eyes, _my good girl_ , and her brother’s hand in hers, his head lowering to lie heavy on her knee. She presses her other hand to his head—his hair soft and dark and loose under a cap that does not belong to the Church—to his cheek like a promise.

If God is not watching, nothing changes. If God is not watching, he is not speaking in the cities either. If God is not watching, she is.

When Cesare presses his lips to her open palm, she breathes in and feels truth in her blood, comfort in her blood, the filth of Sforza’s intruding words that has rested on her skin for days on end now moving a thousand miles away.

Family has always been holy. This—this has always been true, truth incarnate in her and him and every one of them. _Honor the father, the mother. Honor the blood._

The anxious stutterings of her pulse: they honor.

“Do get up,” she says softly. “Haven’t you had enough kneeling for a lifetime?”

She would never ask such things of him.

 

_IV: 1498_

Since the first, the Sforza, she has grown into her bones, her bosom; she can wear wedding gowns properly now, without stumbling, not swimming in this gown that suits her like a second skin. She is clad in white, in pearls, and mermaid-like she is borne up on the Duke of Bisceglie’s bright gaze.

When the priest intones Latin, she lets her eyes flit to him. He stands straight and tall, eyes fixed firmly on the priest and his book. A good man. Sunbright; she can feel her sister-in-law’s smile on her back, so clear and warm it nearly burns. Sancia has lived in her retinue more than ever this past week; she cannot walk by Sancia without Sancia kissing her cheek, wrapping her arms around Lucrezia’s waist, breathless and close and breath a hiccup of laughter. Sancia, who tactfully avoids Cesare’s gaze when they share placement in a room, Cesare—

She cannot but see him close by, stark and funereal and masked. As if black velvet could diminish him even in a room burning with gold. She sees him clearly, and she wishes she could look closer: she cannot make out his eyes.

Yet she has always known his heart nearly as well as she has known her own (for all that month after month he spends more and more time further and further away—) and she is willing to believe—to will herself to believe—that all she would see there are reflections of happiness, or of sorrows and furies she cannot, will not touch. She shall drink wine from his cup tonight, she thinks; she shall print happiness into his drink as she supposes their enemies dream of dropping in poison. They shall all drink it in, she thinks, dazzled, happy, turning her eyes back to her husband, her husband: _Alfonso_ , she thinks, who is good, as she has always known a man could be.

She sneaks one last glimpse at him, at his focused face and hair gold as haloes, as hers—they look, she realizes, far more like siblings than she and Cesare ever did, and her eyes widen; she is almost surprised into laughter. Always in the worst places, always here, she is on the verge of humor, of hysterics: of ecstasy, she’s sure. She is a Borgia, as scrutinized as any one of the Vatican’s jewels; she has learned to bite it back, and she lets the reflected knowledge of him, printed in the same patterns, watching her anchor her even as she feels herself awash in the promise of herself and the man beside her. There is still an anchor, a countermand in black, and the knowledge of him steadies her as she stands through the priest's interminable litanies. Her lips, thus, only bear the faintest giveaway curl of a smile, nails pinching reminders of sobriety into her palm, as she waits to say her piece.

 

_V: 1502_

She invited him: “you have a place there,” she had said, the words falling more stiffly than they ever had in newer years. “You may”—in years past it would have been _you must_ —“visit me.”

“Ah, no,” he had replied, and his eyes had been puzzling and sad and somehow, impossibly, still smiling for her through the end, “Ferrara is yours—as surely as if you conquered it. As I’m very sure you shall.”

What no longer lies between them: _what’s yours is mine._

Ferrara is hers and the world is white as marital sheets when she rides out toward it. “Take good care of yourself, sister,” Cesare says to her. A slow smile crosses his face as he pats her horse on the flank, fingers between hers. “Take good care of the state.”

She nods, watches his horse as it retreats into the snow.

In a new set of apartments, she thinks as she begins to move along the path, she will not sleep with memories tinged red—or gold—she will not sleep by Pinturrichio’s painted faces, beneath the arc of her own jubilantly watchful gaze. The rooms will not thin between her and her brother, for her brother will not follow her and neither will his ghosts, which are also hers. The rosary she carries in her purse is wooden, carved. She will not think of the carpenter (his bright hair, his absentminded hands fiddling deftly with a gilded penknife, his blood on the floor of their shared room and on the larger knife and nearly invisible on the sleeve of her brother's black shirt); she simply loops the beads around her fingers when they stop to let the horses rest and is glad of the simple grain of it.

Still, she leaves with the print of his palm on her palm. When her husband, a second Alfonso, unknown and stoic in the face, takes her by the hand, presses his winter-stiff lips against it, the knowledge of it does not slip away.

“You are welcome here, Donna Lucrezia.”

She slips prettily from her horse and smiles like a much older woman. “Thank you,” she says, and the speech is familiar, but the land is new. “I think I shall like it well.”


End file.
